SA placed 80th worldwide in broadband speeds

South Africa is placed 80th worldwide in terms of average broadband speeds, according to new research.

The data from 63m broadband speed tests in 189 countries, and extracted by Cable.co.uk, shows that South Africa is placed just behind Morocco and ahead of the United Arab Emirates with an average download speed of 4.36Mbit/s, meaning it would take the average user three hours and 55 minutes to download a 7.5GB high-definition movie.

Singapore, Sweden and Taiwan top the list with mean download speeds of 55.13Mbit/s, 40.16Mbit/s and 34.4Mbit/s respectively. The US placed 21st at 20Mbit/s, with the UK coming in at 31st at 16.51Mbit/s.

The three worst-performing countries are Yemen, in last place at 340kbit/s, then Gabon (410kbit/s) and Burkina Faso (490kbit/s). The Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia rounded out the bottom five.

Twenty of the top 30 fastest-performing countries are located in Europe, with seven in Asia, two in North America and one in Oceania. By contrast, 17 of the 30 slowest-performing countries are located in Africa

Cable.co.uk analysed more than 63m broadband speed tests worldwide in drawing up the list. About 93 000 of these came from South Africa.

The data was collected across the 12 months up to 10 May this year by M-Lab, a partnership between New America’s Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University’s PlanetLab, and other supporting partners, Cable.co.uk said.

The five fastest countries have download speeds around 40 times faster than the five slowest.

Downloading the 7.5GB movie would take 18 minutes and 34 seconds at the average speed experienced in Singapore, while it would take over two days in last-placed Yemen.

Twenty of the top 30 fastest-performing countries are located in Europe, with seven in Asia, two in North America and one in Oceania. By contrast, 17 of the 30 slowest-performing countries are located in Africa, with seven in Asia, six in South America and one in Oceania.

One hundred and thirty-nine countries failed to achieve average speeds above 10Mbit/s, a speed deemed by UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom to be the minimum required to cope with the needs of a typical family or small business. — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media

So Staff Reporter, you quote a report (by a lesser known source as well) and you don’t even give a URL where to go and view this report??? Anybody that has any common sense will SERIOUSLY doubt a report that shows SA’s broadband speeds higher than that of the UAE. I live in Dubai and it is common knowledge that essentially all homes have FTTH and furthermore LTE networks have dedicated spectrum. Compare this report with more credible sources like Opensignal and you might want to rethink this article.